“Don’t any of you have straight guy friends you could introduce me to?” my friend Maggie asked a gaggle of homos one Sunday morning in my apartment over broccoli frittatas and coffee. She ticked off a laundry list of disheartening details from several blind dates over the past few weeks.

Of course I know straight men. Besides, I thought, I’m not one of them—you know, those gay men living in a gay ghetto, socializing only with other gay men in gay places in our gay code of sex, fashion, circuit party music: I’m not a homo living in a 128-beats-per-minute poppers-and-Gucci bubble. I’m fully capable of having a thoughtful, enriching relationship with homos and nonhomos alike. To wit, I have lesbian and straight women amigas, and we get along famously. I’m sure I have some straight men friends tucked away somewhere, don’t I?

A quick mental inventory yielded no hetero guy friends. It’s not like I’ve excised all hetero males from my life except for relatives, coworkers, and the boyfriends of my female friends in order to have the all-gay, all-the-time existence—is it? I tried to come up with a few reasons that I’m not hanging out with heteros:

It’s my fault because it’s all about sex. Straight men tend to divide the world into two sets: a same-sex group for most of their platonic relationships, and an opposite-sex group that includes sex and romantic partners. Gay men often have female friends, but we find both sexual/romantic partners and platonic relationships in the same-sex group. People don’t merely have a sexual orientation—it seems we all have a platonic orientation too. This can’t help but have some impact: We make friends differently than straight men do.

It’s a matter of size. Because I live in L.A., a large city with a significant gay population, I have the opportunity to meet gay men with different interests and of different ethnic and social backgrounds; when I lived in Salt Lake City (a conservative, medium-size city), the gay community was smaller and less diverse. My hometown had a smaller pool of eligible gay men, so if I wanted a social circle, straight men—who were plentiful—figured in.

To find out more about what happened to Breen’s straight male friends, pick up the November issue of Out.